by Michael Sala
‘For God’s sake,’ Mum says. ‘She’s in heat.’
She holds her belly and sighs, and there’s a look in her eyes as if she might burst into tears.
4
Jonno doesn’t weigh a thing. Michaelis holds his new brother and grins at the camera. Dirk takes the picture, his mouth heavy inside the beard.
‘I can’t believe you’re letting him do that.’
‘He’ll be all right.’ Mum stands beside Michaelis, hands planted above her hips, palms pressing into her lower back, as if she still has the weight inside her. The air is drowsy with bees and smells of honey from the bushes crowded with white and yellow daisies. Michaelis is six, but in a few months he will be seven. He can stick his tongue between his front teeth. He wishes that they were straight like Con’s.
‘Your teeth are fine,’ Mum says. ‘You don’t want to look perfect.’
He sees Mum sometimes, from the edge of the schoolyard, where he plays alone with a view all the way down to his house. She walks along the street, arms crossed, staring ahead. Jonno isn’t with her. She looks like she is going somewhere, but then she returns, with a look like she can’t remember why she started out in the first place.
For a while, after school, he starts taking twenty-cent coins from Mum’s wallet and buying assorted lollies at the corner store: cobbers, milk bottles, freckles, white-chocolate buttons. The idea came from Constantine, and it’s an adventure until Dirk catches him at it, picks him up by the hair, carries him into his room, and hits him until long after he has promised never to do it again.
But in the late afternoons, he still steals a box of matches when he can from Dirk’s supply and crouches in the gutter near the mangroves in the harbour at the end of the street. He works his way through the matches, one at a time, striking them, watching the flame burn towards his thumb, and he thinks of being inside a stranded car, surrounded by the wilderness, Mum flicking the headlights on and off, looking for what?
And then, a few months after Jonno’s birth, Dirk and Mum pack the car for a long trip. Harmony does not come along.
‘Where would we fit her?’ Mum asks them.
It’s true. The back of the station wagon is full of their things and that’s where Harmony usually goes.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see.’
They drive with Jonno in the back, between Michaelis and Constantine.
‘How far away is it?’
‘You’ll know when we get there.’
They eat McDonald’s and stay in a hotel where you can hear traffic on the highway all night, and drive again the next day. They stop at service stations and for a while at a beach with pale sand that slopes beneath the clear blue water forever. Holding Jonno, Mum walks into the water in her dress, which floats white and luminescent up around her calves. They get back into the car. Michaelis sleeps.
Mum shifts suddenly in the front seat and looks back at them. ‘We’re here.’
The sun is gone. A long, broad bridge stretches under a summer evening sky over an expanse of water beyond which he can see a darkening shoreline crowded with saltbush.
‘There, on the other side, that’s where we’ll live now.’
Everything on Bribie Island broods. The long, straight roads boil with heat. Tar and sand scald and toughen the soles of Michaelis’s feet. The brown, leathery corpses of toads sit on the roads baking in the sun, dried blood around them. You can see storms coming in from the sea. The water is flat. There are waves on the other side of the island, but you forget that they even exist. Like your father. Blue-grey clouds spill into the horizon and tighten with convulsions of light and throbbing booms of thunder.
He goes swimming with Con in the outlet to a lagoon that pokes like a finger from the ocean into the land. A tree, stripped of bark and leaves, leans over the water and they jump from one of its dead branches.
All day the tide moves in that place, carrying out the silty waters of the mangrove swamp or bringing in currents from the flat sea. They climb up the tree and jump into the mild shock of the water. Climb and jump, climb and jump.
One day, Constantine jumps into the tentacles of a jellyfish. He scrambles out with red welts all over his body and runs home, screaming. Michaelis can hear him in the distance as he walks home by himself, carrying his brother’s shirt. When Constantine hurts himself, he cries out at the top of his lungs, but never when he is in a fight, or beating Michaelis, or when Dirk loses his temper.
Dirk is always home, sitting in the living room, watching television, smoking his pipe, reading the newspaper to find work. Straw tiles again cover the old carpet and fill the house with a barn smell. It’s the smell of new beginnings. You smell it more at night, when you lie in bed. The tiles are meant to make every house feel like the same home, like wherever they go they are carrying the most important part with them.
The ceiling of the unit is low with a crumbed concrete texture, like a giant yellow fish finger. He sleeps on the bottom bunk; Constantine has decided that the top is better. When Michaelis goes to sleep, he hears Constantine’s fingers tapping soft, sustained drum lines. A torn flap at the bottom of the flyscreen flutters with the breeze. Inside the house, down the corridor and over the stop-start wailing of Jonno, Dirk and Mum are arguing.
On Sunday nights, Con and Michaelis have a radio on and they roll in their beds to the songs they like. They both do this, rock silently back and forth, their heads burrowing into their pillows. When did it start? Perhaps Con started doing it first—Michaelis doesn’t know—but they do it now and they call it rolling. It makes his hair messy, but he can’t help doing it. They don’t talk much, but Michaelis can hear his brother down below him, the creak of his bed in the darkness. It’s like they’re inmates in a World War II prison camp, listening to the outside world, moving nowhere in small, frustrated rhythms. They listen to the top forty.
After dinner, Constantine and Michaelis wash the dishes. Constantine decides what job he wants and Michaelis takes the other. Sometimes drying is better, sometimes washing. Constantine’s eyes are fixed on something hidden, his mouth set. They stand side by side and they sweat and stare into the blackness through the window above the sink. Sometimes they drop something and it shatters and Dirk is there with his verdomme and his large hands to punish them for being idiots.
Michaelis has no idea what they are doing here, what they are looking for, why they left Newcastle. He asks Mum.
She doesn’t look at him. ‘I needed a change.’
Out the back of the house lies a sandy scrubland that is deserted during the day. But each morning when Michaelis goes there, he sees the tracks of animals—wallabies, birds, foxes, snakes—scrawling off in every direction. There is an indentation in this wasteland, the size of half a football field, like a bowl, with cracked earth at the centre. When the rain comes, after weeks and weeks of heat and sun and hardly any breeze, it belts down for days, plums of water bursting from the sky and rattling the windows.
The basin becomes a lake. Michaelis goes in as far as his waist, checks that no one is around, then takes off his swimmers so that his balls float beneath him. He swims around with his shorts in his teeth. The water tastes sweet. The hum of insects gathers around him and he lets his gaze drift into the saltbush and shrubs that form a wall between him and the nearest buildings. At the bottom of the lake, the earth has turned to clay. Michaelis dives and sinks his fists into it. He emerges from the water with the clay in his hands and tries making bowls on the shore. They fall apart.
Everything at home is falling apart, too. Although the grey carpet is covered in straw tiling, no one can cover the strange, crumbling ceiling. The shower door has three panels that are meant to slide across, but they get stuck all the time. Michaelis turns the shower off and tries to open the door. It jams, the second against the third, which comes off its hinges at the bottom.
Constantine comes into the bathroom.
‘It’s stuck,’ Michaelis says. ‘I can’t move
it.’
‘Yeah?’ Constantine examines the door, then backs away with a smile on his face.
As he leaves, he closes the door and turns off the light. Michaelis can’t see his own hands and all of the horror stories he has ever heard and all the movies he’s seen come rushing into his head. He thinks of the Blob, squeezing up from the blackness of the drain between his feet, dissolving skin and muscle and bone. A desperate strength possesses him. He wrenches at the panels until they clatter off their hinges and leaps over them. He flings open the door and lurches into the light. A chair creaks in the living room. Dirk comes down the corridor, shoulders him aside, stares in at the shower screen with a crack down its length, lying on the floor. He takes off one workboot.
Michaelis drops to the ground and lifts his hands. ‘Don’t, please don’t! Constantine turned off the light!’
Dirk looks down at him with contempt. ‘Stomme idioot! When will you stop acting like a little girl?’
After he’s done with Michaelis, he walks out looking for Constantine. Mum is somewhere in the background, crying and telling Dirk to stop, but Dirk never stops, not until he’s finished.
~
Drifting in on the wind and tide come huge crowds of bluebottles. They cluster along the shore in heaps and slowly dry and pop underfoot. There is no way that Michaelis wants to stay out of the water in this heat, so he swims carefully, trying to spot the blue threads as they drift near. Jonno crawls across the bluebottles on the shore, popping them with his knees. He picks a fresh one up and swallows it whole and everyone has to go across the bridge, back to the mainland, to the hospital.
‘It happened so quickly,’ Mum says. ‘One minute he is right there, and then the next…’
Dirk jerks one finger at his temple. ‘You’re not paying attention, verdomme, caught up in that head of yours.’
On the fifth of December, they celebrate St Nicholas Day. This is when you get presents back in Holland, not Christmas.
‘Sinterklaas is the real name for Santa Claus. These people just don’t know it.’ Mum puts on a record of St Nicholas songs that she brought all the way from Holland and they sing together through the hiss and crackle of the strange words.
‘Hoor wie klopt daar kinderen.’
Michaelis misses half of the words, but the rhythm carries him along.
Then Dirk has to go out for tobacco. While he is gone, Mum talks about Sinterklaas and his Moorish helper, Black Peter. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if they came all the way here to the other side of the world to visit us after three years? Or perhaps we should go back home to visit them? Would you like that, to go back home?’
Mum looks at Michaelis and Constantine and the question hangs between them. But if Sinterklaas comes here, he will arrive by ship, the way that he used to in Bergen op Zoom. He used to ride onto the wharf from the barge on his white horse, Black Peter holding the reins. Michaelis can’t remember when he saw it, but he can recall Sinterklaas’s white gloves resting against the grey mane of the horse, his silver beard down to his waist, and the velvety red folds of his cloak, edged in gold.
Black Peter carries a bag full of sweets across one shoulder. Chocolate, taaitaai, liquorice, things made out of different kinds of marshmallow, lots of pepper nuts—which aren’t really nuts at all, but spicy biscuits the size of pebbles. You can’t unravel the flavours in those biscuits. They are strange, contradictory; they shouldn’t taste good. If you sing the songs for long enough, back in Bergen op Zoom, Black Peter will knock on your door and throw in the sweets.
They sing along, above the deafening rattle of insects and frogs, hoping and waiting in the humidity and heat of a summer evening, and then all at once a startling rap shakes the door, a black hand flashes into view, and in come flying handfuls of sweets, skittering across the floor, and you are scrambling as if there is no heat and no crowded darkness and no Bribie Island, just you and your brother and all of those things from home.
The only one who misses out is Dirk. Mum says this doesn’t matter.
‘Dirk had his chance to dive for sweets when he was a little boy.’
Dirk as a little boy. It is not as hard to imagine as you might think, not when you see him at the dinner table, measuring the servings on the plates with rapid movements of his eyes while his mouth tugs downwards at the corners. He looks much younger then, a little scared. But when his gaze swivels to yours, his fork poised to strike the hand that reaches for food too soon, the boy is gone.
~
Nikki and his parents, Susan and Paul, have come to visit from Newcastle. They all go on a daytrip out to the Big Pineapple. Pineapple plants lean in sullen, leafy ranks across the hills. Michaelis and Nikki get away from everyone and wander around the souvenir shop looking at small plastic pineapples on key rings and bottles full of sand arranged in coloured layers.
Nikki picks up and puts down a range of jars full of coloured sand. ‘We might be coming up here to live.’
‘My mum hates it here,’ Michaelis tells him.
Mum has started saying this all the time. She’ll be staring into space with a cigarette dangling from her slack mouth, and it comes out like a sigh.
Nikki buys two small vials of the coloured sand. Different colours in rippling layers, one on top of the other. He offers Michaelis one of the vials.
‘Here, you want this?’
Nikki always buys things and gives them away without a second thought. All Michaelis has to do is make sure Mum doesn’t find out.
Then there’s a commotion outside. An ambulance has pulled up, flashing lights, crowd gathering around. The two of them walk over to have a closer look.
Susan appears before them, her face harassed. ‘There you are, boys!’
Two men are wheeling a trolley towards the ambulance, a woman on it, crying and screaming, like she’s about to be buried alive, arms flailing, the paramedics trying to restrain her, lots of onlookers. The woman is Mum.
Constantine comes and stands beside them, observing it all with a bored look. ‘What happened?’
‘I think she’s had a panic attack,’ Susan says. ‘It’s stress. And heat. She’s never handled the heat well.’
The Big Pineapple looms behind them, a fat, round, three-storey fibreglass pineapple, blazing in the sunlight against a plantation backdrop. There is big everything in Australia. You see it when you drive from one place to another, along the winding highways. The Big Prawn, the Big Banana, the Big Sheep, the Big Shearer, even the Big Mosquito, which sat on the edge of swampland near where they used to live, back in Newcastle. Giant versions of ordinary things, along roads that never seem to end. The souvenir shop is built into the pineapple’s base. People shuffle and murmur through it, through the sickly sweet smell of pineapple jam and pineapple chutney and the lingering odour of their own bodies and the ones that have come before. Michaelis runs his fingers along the sand-filled vial in his pocket.
Susan puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘Your mother’s had a hard life. I don’t know how she got through it all.’
Michaelis thinks of what Dirk says about Mum sometimes. That she’s weak, unstable. Dirk will say those things as he taps his skull with one finger. People always tell Michaelis he looks like his mother. He glimpses her raving inside the ambulance before they close the doors and wonders if the panic will attack him one day, too.
‘Come on, boys,’ Susan tells them. ‘Let’s go home.’ One moment, Mum is taken off in an ambulance, the next it feels like nothing has happened. A room in their unit is stacked with packed boxes and furniture. Michaelis shows it to Nikki and they stand side by side, telling stories and comparing their penises, oblivious to the meaning of all the goods stacked in the room. But later, he wonders. Are they moving again? Is this stuff they just haven’t got round to unpacking after the last time?
They go to see a bushfire, on another part of the island, with crowds of onlookers and grimy-faced firefighters directing spouts of water into the flames and the smoke. Mum watches with Jonno in he
r arms, in the shadow of Dirk, who stands there clamping his pipe from one end of his mouth to the other. Michaelis sits on Dirk’s shoulders. He sees the sweat gathering between the curls of Dirk’s hair. Livid thumbprints of ash turn end over end through the haze, past him and over him, and one spirals down to settle against Jonno’s fleshy, exposed leg. Jonno does not react at first, then his body snaps into life, and he breaks into a terrible screaming.
Michaelis thinks of all this late at night, with sleep impossibly far away and all the tiny noises of the night outside against his ear, and Mum pacing and Dirk snoring, and Jonno’s crying breaking out from that every now and again. Dirk can sleep through anything. When Dirk shifts in bed, it’s like a train pulling out of a station. ‘It’s too hard,’ Mum says as she rocks Jonno from side to side, cradling the phone between her shoulder and ear, the morning light already thick around her ankles. Mum is speaking in Dutch. Words dug out of the ground. ‘You can’t live in a country without family around you. It’s too hard. You can only put up with it for so long. Verschrikkelijk.’
Michaelis sneaks off. He wanders along the edge of the ocean. Spotted sharks and rays swim lazily through the rocky shallows in the drawn-out light. The water near the shore is so clear it almost isn’t there. Further out it gets dark and blue. One of the old fishermen told him that there are enough sharks in the nearby waters to eat everyone on the island. Michaelis imagines the rasping sound of sharks dragging themselves onto the land in search of food at night.
He always comes back for dinner. Mum insists that everyone should eat at the table, not in front of the television like some families. Dirk makes sure no one is late.